History Keeps Me Awake at Night

(Paperback)

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Description

Margit is at the point in life when things should have cohered. She's married, she's got a degree, she's got friends who throw good parties, and yet she's still adrift, moving from one precarious job to the next. One day, a picture of some Mexican students catches her eye in a newspaper. The group of 43 had been ambushed by police in 2014 while travelling on a bus and disappeared without a trace. And so begins Margit's obsession with the 'desaparecidos'. As she heads off down the rabbit holes and cul-de-sacs of Google Maps, her idiosyncratic quest to uncover the truth of what happened begins to eclipse pretty much everything else.

From a sharp and singular new literary voice, this is a novel that captures the texture of life in a frictionless city with drop-pin accuracy, while asking: is it possible to recover what is lost without losing oneself

Reviews

An intelligent debut... Edwall is a talented writer and I look forward to seeing what she does next * Observer *
Fizzes with smart observations on modern life * Daily Mail *
It is a zeitgeisty set-up, with the air of a true-crime podcast about it... There is much to admire about this debut * I Newspaper *
There's a real energy and poise to Edwall's prose and she has a delightful eye for the telling detail * Literary Review *
With its blend of fact and fiction, History Keeps Me Awake at Night holds its own among other notable books of the genre in recent years... Compelling * Irish Times *
Edwall's descriptions of Margit's life in London are starkly real, recognizable... Margit is a highly original and memorable protagonist * TLS *
A bold, highwire novel... Edwall has produced an existential psychological thriller for aesthetes and lovers of cultural London and the world... A story cleverly told of a young woman involved in contemporary forms of global voyeurism -- Sally Bayley
An intelligent and zeitgeisty debut * Big Issue North *

Author Bio

Christy Edwall was born in South Africa in 1985. She has a doctorate in English Literature from Oxford, and her writing has appeared in Granta.com, Stinging Fly, the Southern Review, and the Times Literary Supplement. She lives in Brighton.